Tracking City Council Members

Haley Ruth-Ognoskie

Hi RE Community!

Has anyone come up with a system for tracking City council members in RE? Everytime new members are elected, the addresses associated with the districts change so I am not sure how to track this and keep it clean. Any suggestions would be appreciated!

Thanks,

Haley

JoAnn Strommen

We enter city council, school board, county commissioners, etc. as individual records.  We use a constituent code of "Elected Official" and an attribute of "Government Affiliation".  Attribute description is a table with 'city/school board/county/state/etc.'  Comment field lists Ward/District and year their term ends.  This has worked for us though we don't utilize "elected officials' solely because of their elected positions as much as I had thought we might.  They just fall in same categories as other donor/prospect records.  Guess we went with individual records as a number of these people already have records in RE and didn't want to add a second.

Gina Gerhard

We actually create organization records for our government records - so we have a master 'State of NH' record, then the various breakouts as org records with a relationship to the State record, and so forth down the line.



We then add the individual members for the state organizations as relationships (most will have their own individual records).  On the relationship record, we can then also have attributes and other information (position, date from/date to, ward/district, etc.)



This is a very clean way of keeping these straight, as members come on/off frequently.  So you can just open up the organization record and see all the current and former members in relationships.  



Querying isn't quite as easy as a constituent code, but I like this system much better as it's very obvious how you've structured this 'pyramid structure' of government records.

Haley Ruth-Ognoskie

Thank you for this. Very helpful!

Haley